March 15, 2012

Turns out that O’Brien, a Harvard grad, has a rather emotional connection to Bell. As documented at my new Twitter curation/aggregation site Twitchy.com, O’Brien tweeted that it was a “rough day” for her when Bell passed away last fall. She wrote that she had “just started re-reading” one of his books and mourned again: “RIP Prof. Bell.” O’Brien also shared tributes to Bell from fellow Harvard prof and friend of Obama Charles Ogletree. That’s the same Professor Ogletree who bragged that he “hid” the Obama/Bell video during the 2008 campaign.

O’Brien failed to disclose her pro-Bell bias to viewers before her segments.

She goes on to discuss O’Brien’s political history – which, not surprisingly, is chock full of “racial/ethnic-centered journalism lobbying groups” and Obama support. “[L]iberal minority journalists simply can’t resist carrying water for Obama,” Malkin writes.

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From MSNBC:

AUDIO: AL SHARPTON TRASHING ‘HOMOS,’ ‘CHINAMEN,’ ‘CRACKERS’

March 14, 2012

If offensive slurs are a problem for the left, why does Al Sharpton have a primetime slot on MSNBC?

The left has started a war against Rush Limbaugh — a war it cannot win. Limbaugh said something for which he later apologized, and rather than accept that apology, the left and its media allies decided to exploit the situation, turning it into a crusade to take an opposing voice off the air.

Even the White House has jumped on this neo-fascist bandwagon. Not the Obama campaign. The White House. The People’s House.

This is, pure and simple, a crusade to censor political speech disguising itself as something else, and it’s a crusade led by Media Matters for America, the Obama political machine, and the mainstream media.

As a result, Obama now looks like a Chicago political thug and nothing like a President of the United States. This was especially apparent when he tried to draw Limbaugh into this war on women nonsense.

Obviously, Obama’s crusade is backfiring, and will continue to fail. In their fever to bring Rush down, Obama and the left have made a huge tactical error in setting a standard of which they themselves are the worst violators — especially in the fever swamps of MSNBC.

It’s been MSNBC that’s grabbed Media Matters’ anti-Rush talking points and run with them 24/7 on the network.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin

Yet their own Ed Schultz is the creatorof the original Slut-gate, when he used that word to describe conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham. And let us never forget Keith Olbermann’s dehumanizing rant against Michelle Malkin, while he was still with the once-legendary Peacock Network. (Much more about MSNBC hosts’ attacks on womenhere.)

Breaking today at the American Spectatoris more bad news for a network devoting so much of its airtime to creating a rule that says someone should be pulled off the air for anything he or she has said that might be considered offensive.

Using MSNBC’s own standards, should the man who once said the following be allowed to hold a primetime MSNBC slot?

David Dinkins, you wanna be the only nigger on television, only nigger in the newspaper, only nigger that can talk. Don’t cover them, don’t talk to them, ’cause you got the only nigger problem. ‘Cause you know if a black man stood up next to you, they would see you for the whore that you really are.

That’s MSNBC’s Al Sharpton–many years ago, but just as shocking today. I can already hear the excuse — that it’s okay for him to use the N-word because he’s black. But I wonder what CNN’s Roland Martin will think of this:

White folks was in the cave when we were building empires. We learned to admire them, but they knew to admire us. We built pyramids without a ____, ____ new architecture ____. We talked philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.

“Greek homos.”

Just a few weeks ago, Roland Martin was suspended from CNN after GLAAD took offense to a few Super Bowl tweets few but GLAAD could ever find offensive — tweets that never even broached the subject of homosexuality.

“Homo,” of course is an anti-gay slur, especially within the context you hear in Sharpton’s words.

[….]

True, Sharpton said these things long before he was on MSNBC. But his history was well known, and the lack of outrage from the left when he was elevated to primetime highlights the hypocrisy of their anti-Rush censorship crusade. MSNBC President Phil Griffin knew that Sharpton said this sort of stuff regularly–that, in fact, such bigotry and radical rhetoric was an integral part of the Sharpton persona. He hired him nonetheless. One has to wonder if Brian Williams, Matt Lauer, and Tom Brokaw are proud.

Over to you, MSNBC!

ADDED: More Slut-gate hypocrisy herefeaturing the White House and Letterman!

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***Add a little Ed Schultz to the MSNBC mix***

MSNBC’S SCHULTZ HAS LONG RECORD OF NASTINESS

March 15, 2012

MSNBC President Phil Griffin, who hired notorious race-baiter Al Sharpton to broadcast in primetime, has now devoted his entire primetime lineup to attacking Rush Limbaugh over his Sandra Fluke criticism. And one of those leading the charge is host Ed Schultz.

Several nights ago, Schultz ripped Rush while denying that his own characterization of Laura Ingraham as a “slut” was in any way similar. He explained, unconvincingly, that his apology came on MSNBC, while Rush’s came on his website – a silly distinction, since Rush’s website gets heavy traffic, and the apology was covered in full. That didn’t stop Schultz, though. He had Fluke on his show, where she proceeded to excoriate Rush; he even had guests on to talk about boycotting Rush.

This is hypocrisy of the highest order. Schultz is a massive bully, and aroutine purveyor of hatemongering rhetoric. He says Republicans “want to see you dead” and want to “make money off your dead corpse!” He said about Dick Cheney that we ought to rip out his heart “and kick it around and stuff it back in him.” He implied that Joe Lieberman’s wife was a “whore.” He called Sen. Harry Reid “ball-less” and stated that the elderly were the “Almost Dead.”

You hired Schultz in 2009. Then you promoted him. Twice. And let’s not forget how you fawned over Schultzto the Los Angeles Times just a few weeks ago saying “This is a guy who understands how to connect with real people.” What’s worse is that your pride of this character assassin isn’t an isolated incident. As President of MSNBC, you oversee a “news outlet” which employs other hate mongers who fling around similarly extreme, hate-filled and politically-motivated rhetoric.

If what Rush said is so offensive that it deserves your network’s obsession with having him removed, then what are you going to do about a host who has a history of insults a hundred-fold worse than anything Limbaugh has ever said? Unless you fire Ed Schultz, you are a complete hypocrite.

Bozell is exactly correct – and he even calls for Griffin to resign. But the answer here is to stop the hypocrisy, not to fire people for taking advantage of their First Amendment rights, no matter how stupid the things they say are. And Ed Schultz says plenty of stupid and offensive things daily.

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OBAMA INVITES TRIG PALIN BIRTHER ANDREW SULLIVAN FOR DINNER

March 15, 2012

According to the Washington Post, the Obama White House invited 362 people to its state dinner for the United Kingdom. One familiar face will be gracing the red carpet: Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast.

For those who don’t remember, Andrew Sullivan is the once-conservative columnist who shifted dramatically to the left over the past few years – and reserved a special hatred in his heart for Sarah Palin and her special needs son Trig.

Early on in the campaign, Sullivansuggested that Trig was not actually Sarah Palin’s son– he was Bristol’s son, and Sarah had claimed him as her own to cover up Bristol’s pregnancy. Her oft-recounted labor drama, said Sullivan, was possibly nonsense; it was more likely that she had made it up. As Sullivan wrote in August 2008, “the noise around this story is now deafening, and the weirdness of the chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions.” Actually, the noise wasn’t deafening – it was just that Sullivan was tone-deaf.

But Sullivan didn’t drop his crusade against Palin and Trig.

In February 2010, Sullivan wrotethat he believed that Palin had named her son Trig after the “medical term for Down Syndrome … Trisomy-21 or Trisomy-g. It is often shortened in medical slang to Tri-G.”

In June 2011, Sullivan continued the “Trig isn’t Sarah’s child” meme, writing:

It’s possible that Palin simply made up her drama of labor, or exaggerated it for effect, when in fact it was a routine, if rare, pregnancy, and she had mild warnings that the birth may be premature, and she gussied that up into a tall tale of her pioneer spirit, guided by her doctor, who refused to take the NYT’s calls as soon as Palin hit the big time. I think that’s the likeliest explanation, given the sheer world-historical weirdness of the alternative.

She has made speech after speech citing her infant son – just as her teenage daughter has been pushed into every public arena imaginable. There is nothing private about Palin’s story about her child with Down Syndrome. Nothing. To examine the details of a story already told in such detail in the public sphere as a core campaign platform is violating no one’s privacy. It is asking relevant questions of a narrative plainly and publicly provided by Palin herself. I have used no facts except those already in the public domain.

Sullivan is a hateful bully. There are no two ways about it. Doubting the parentage of someone’s son based on sheer, nasty speculation in the face of all available evidence sinks to the reprehensible. It’s a hell of a lot worse than the absurd leftist narrative about Slut-gate. It’s White House-backed lunacy. And it’s the latest in a series. If, as we reported yesterday, Louis C.K. did indeed visit the White House, this is just the most recent example of an Administration far too comfortable with nasty bullies – and deeply hypocritical when it comes to its pursuit of so-called incivility on the other side of the aisle.

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Will Andrew Sullivan “Rehash” this if Romney is GOP Presidential Candidate?

The Andrew Sullivan Double Standard

MARCH 15, 2008<<<NOTE DATE

BY ED MORRISSEY

The reaction of Obama supporters to Jeremiah Wright has certainly been instructive, especially those who had plenty to say about Mitt Romney and Mormonism last year. Today’s example is Andrew Sullivan, who wonderedwhether Romney wore Mormon underwear and postedrepeatedly about the polygamy that Romney’s faith repudiated over a century earlier. Today, he’s singing a different tune about Barack Obama, whose minister didn’t make his racially inflammatory statements 100 years ago or even thirty years ago:

All I can say is that very, very few public figures have been so candid about why and how they found the message of Jesus so compelling, or have explained their faith journey so pellucidly (certainly not our spiritually inarticulate current president). The appeal of that church to Obama was not anger or racism or the ugliness in some of Jeremiah Wright’s tub-thumping. What Obama discovered – as a previous atheist – was the spiritual power of Christian hope. …

I don’t know how you can read Obama’s writing or listen to any of his speeches and believe that Wright’s ugliest messages are what Obama believes or has ever believed.

Bear in mind that all of these speeches took place while Obama attended Wright’s church and contributed to his ministry. Here’s Andrewon Mitt Romney’s responsibility for racism that his church publicly repudiated 30 years ago, and against which Romney repeatedly argued. He agrees with Christopher Hitchens’ statement:

Mitt Romney was an adult in 1978. We need to know how he justified this to himself, and we need to hear his self-criticism, if he should chance to have one.

[Andrew] The awful history of the LDS church’s treatment of African-Americans requires an accounting by any leading Mormon …

Let’s make this clear. Romney had a responsibility to explain the racism of the Mormons, which they themselves repudiated in 1978, including “self-criticism” for being a Mormon during that period. However, with Obama belonging to and supporting a church in which his self-described “moral compass” preaches that the US created the HIV virus to commit genocide and calling the nation the “the US of KKK-A”, Obama gets a pass because … he writes so beautifully of the faith he found through Jeremiah Wright?